Tag Archives: Social Media

Sparks explores social business strategy with three talented business leaders:

• Peter Friedman – Chairman and CEO, LiveWorld
• Sandy Carter – VP Social Business & Collaboration Solutions Sales & Evangelism, IBM
• Matt Tucker – Co-Founder and CEO, Jive Software

Highlights

“The core principles of social media – dialogue and relationships – are the same for consumers and businesses. [Social] isn’t just for Christmas. It’s for life. It’s relationship marketing [that] wants follow through.”

Peter Friedman

Read the full interview with Peter Friedman.

“High performing companies are … 57% more likely to use social techniques. Social business … removes boundaries between experts inside and outside of a company.”

Sandy Carter

Read the full interview with Sandy Carter.

“Every company should be looking at a broader social business strategy Social business software … will touch every employee and be a part of every customer and partner interaction in every vertical.”

Matt Tucker

Read the full interview with Matt Tucker.

Matt Tucker

Matt Tucker, co-founder and CTO, is responsible for the long-term technical and strategic direction of Jive’s products. Along with Bill Lynch, Matt founded Jive Software in 2001 and has helped build the company from just two people to where it is today. Matt is an active member in open standards communities including having served on the board of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

Prior to Jive, Matt worked as a software engineer at an internet startup in San Francisco called 4charity.

Matt holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Iowa.

How do you define social media?

Social media is the set of technologies in our consumer lives that have transformed the way we communicate and engage with our friends and family via sites like Facebook and Twitter. For businesses, there is social business software and we tend to use the term social business, rather than social media.

What’s driving the shift to social business?

Over the past decade, there has been a profound lack of innovation in the tools we use for communication and collaboration in our work lives. Most of us are still stuck in email and Microsoft Office or with enterprise software that is really hard to use and provides a terrible user experience. There’s a reason that shows like “The Office” or cartoons like “Dilbert” exist. It’s because work sucks. Most of us understand that and implicitly understand that we need better tools and new ways to work together.

Social business represents a revolution in how employees inside companies can communicate and collaborate, and also how companies communicate with their customers and partners.

How are companies using social business software to grow? What problems are they tackling?

On average, sales reps spend 20 percent of their time searching for information. That’s money left on the table. Social business software connects sales reps with the experts, content, and information they need to collaborate so they never sell alone. This makes their sales teams more efficient. They share best practices and get the latest field or competitive data as quickly as possible which significantly impacts revenue generation.
Sometimes companies are simply looking to provide tools that will get the next generation of employees really engaged. Recent college graduates have grown up using Facebook, Twitter and that whole set of technologies which make it easy to interact with their entire social network. If they get into a company with ten-year-old technology, they are just not satisfied. For them, social software is about enabling tools and user experiences that employees now expect.

Innovation is another major challenge companies can and are addressing with social business software. Rather than having an in-person once a year customer advisory board meeting, they’re gathering real time customer feedback and ideas by sharing the latest road map and product plans. This makes the iterative innovation cycle much, much faster.
So, companies usually choose a business driver and set a goal of driving very specific results. After they see the results, social becomes a ubiquitous communication and collaboration layer and they keep finding more and more challenges to take on with the social approach.

What kinds of results are Jive customers seeing with social?

We recently surveyed our whole customer base to try to quantify the business impact of social business adoption. The feedback clearly indicates a material impact on business performance.

First, social business software can make employee communication profoundly more efficient, enabling interaction with a much wider variety of employees much faster. Surveyed customers showed impressive results, including:

• 30 percent increase in employee satisfaction
• 27 percent less email volume
• 32 percent reduction in time to find answers
• 37 percent increase in project collaboration and productivity

CSC is an example of a customer that has seen great results. They have 92,000 employees in over 90 countries, so barriers like time, distance and siloed organizations were complicating and lengthening their proposal process. Their Jive-powered community attracted 25,000 users in its first 20 weeks and made locating internal experts to facilitate collaboration easier. They shaved days off the bid and proposal process which has lowered customer acquisition costs and driven broad process efficiencies.

Second, social business software greatly improves interaction with customers and partners. In our survey, companies saw:

• 42 percent more communication with customers
• 31 percent increase in customer retention
• 28 percent decrease in support call volume
• 34 percent more feedback and ideas from customers
• 27 percent increase in new customer sales

SAP is an example of a customer that uses Jive to power its 1-million strong collaboration network for software developers, business process experts, customers, and partners. Their social business community achieved a 5% reduction in product release cycles and a 5% increase in partner sales.

Similarly, Intel was able to increase engagement and reduce costs by shifting half of its partner events to the web. Intel’s business is primarily channel driven so enabling a large-scale online partner community has significantly reduced the huge costs ($500k+ per event) associated with enabling 200,000+ partners around the globe.

Are there companies that should not pursue a social business strategy?

If your customers or your partners are on Facebook, Twitter and other consumer social sites, then you should be too. You should have a social media strategy. But, every company should be looking at a broader social business strategy.

Social business software is the most important new enterprise software category in at least a decade because it will touch every employee and be a part of every customer and partner interaction in every vertical. There is no pocket of the enterprise that is not adopting it and any company can benefit from implementing social business software.

However, some companies are more ready than others to adopt social software, for a couple of reasons. One is general readiness which is based on things like the company culture and age of the work force. These impact how quickly people are able to change the way they work together. The second is the size of the problem that the company is trying to solve. The larger the problem, the more worthwhile it is to address with social business.

What’s important in a social business strategy?

First, choose the right problems to tackle first so that it is successful and embraced inside your company. Select a couple of really hard problems that social can have a massive impact on. That will drive change and how people are willing to interact with one another. Innovation is an example of a big problem that is a critical piece of some companies’ entire strategy. Making innovating faster and better by speeding iteration cycles leads directly to top line revenue and to growth.

Second, keep in mind that implementing a social effort is not just a matter of choosing a technology and deploying it. There are a set of cultural and process changes to factor in as well. Social truly is a new way of getting work done so it means adopting new ways of working together as employees and new ways of interacting with customers and partners.

Does social require people in different roles or just in the same roles doing different things?

There are some new roles that are created inside of companies for social. There is a community manager that helps run and nurture the implementations of social business software. Customer support folks will need policies and guidelines on how to engage with employees, customers and prospects on the company’s social platform as well as on Facebook and Twitter. You shouldn’t need a lot of training to get started, but it is a different way of getting business done so you need to go about it the right way.

What trends do you think we’ll see in B2B social in the next few years?

The first trend is that Facebook is at over six hundred million users and racing toward a billion. This has already transformed our consumer lives and we are at the early stage of the impact that social will have on business. I expect there is going to be massive growth in the next two to four years in social business and 2011 will be an inflection point for mainstream adoption in the enterprise.

The second trend is that social is becoming a platform inside companies. There have been massive investments in ERP, CRM, and different content management systems in recent decades. Social business software is becoming the layer that connects all of those different systems with people. It’s a much easier and faster way to interact with all that content. So in the enterprise world, social as a platform or layer across the enterprise is one of the biggest trends we’ll see over the next couple of years.

A third trend is that social business will come to where you are already working. Social represents a profoundly new way to get work done and people don’t change overnight so there has to be a way to transition into this new way of getting work done. So, bringing social tools to Microsoft Office or your email where you already work is a really important trend.

All of these changes will mean that work will be good again. It will be as easy and fun to interact with people in your work life as it is in your personal life. Most of us spend the majority of our lives at work so if we can make that truly better, that’s a mission we get pretty fired up about at Jive.

Sandy Carter

Sandy Carter is Vice President of Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Sales and Evangelism at IBM where she sets the direction for IBM’s Social Business initiative, works with companies who are becoming Social Businesses, and is the evangelist for the concept and best practices around Social Business. She is the best-selling author of two books, an avid social media evangelist, and is one of the top Bloggers and Twitter-ers in IBM. Prior to her current position, Ms. Carter was VP, Software Business Partners and Midmarket where she was responsible for IBM’s worldwide software ecosystem initiatives.

Ms. Carter holds a B.S. degree in math and computer science from Duke University an MBA from Harvard, and is fluent in eight programming languages. She received a patent for developing a methodology and tool to help customers create a technology deployment path in automation of their IT processes.

How do you define social media?

Actually, we don’t think in terms of social media. We think of the broader concept of “social business.” Social business elevates social media to be used in a work setting, speeding business along with real-time insight and making social interactions truly impactful to a business.

We define social business as a nimble, transparent, and engaged two-way dialog that removes boundaries between experts inside and outside of a company. We strongly believe that social businesses will be more agile, more responsive and more successful than non-social businesses. They’ll activate networks of people to improve their processes, marketing, customer service and more to create a higher return on investment. We’re already seeing from our 2010 Global Chief Human Resource Officer Study that high performing companies – those with better stock prices, profits and business results – are 57 percent more likely to use social techniques in their companies.

What B2B uses of social are you seeing now?

In a B2B environment, you want to build a trusted relationship, drive brand advocacy, and create dialog across communities and channels. B2B is more about developing your best friends whereas B2C is more about developing a party with a big group of friends. B2B client relationships tend to be deeper and take a little longer. You can see that difference in how two companies used social in product innovation.

Consumer-focused Coach developed a forum for crowd-sourcing one of its bags. They had something like 6 million engagements – a great response from a broad audience.

On the other hand, we recently worked with a company focused on tapping a small private community in biotechnology. They also wanted the community to provide them insight on their next generation product through social. But this company accessed a smaller set of influencers in a private community for brainstorming and sharing insights on breakthrough ideas.

But being a social business isn’t just about B2B or B2C. There’s such power in using social media even inside a company. Collaborating inside is a powerful way to share expertise, develop products, and make business decisions faster and cheaper. Slumberland Furniture, a small Midwestern furniture company, uses social media internally to train its franchisees. They do video training, share best practices real time, and have debates across their 120 franchise stores. They’re able to leverage ideas and best practices from experts within their own business environment.

How is social driving IBM’s growth?

IBM leverages B2B marketing by embedding social in everything we do. A great example is how we used social with Watson. Watson is a DeepQA machine that can understand natural language and deliver a single, precise answer to a question. Most people know Watson as a recent Jeopardy contestant but the technology represents a huge leap forward in data analytics technology that will have a big impact on business and industry. We used social to connect people to Watson and spark their imaginations about what the technology could do. We sponsored Watson parties where customers could watch the Jeopardy event, talk to our scientists live about it and tweet about it. Watson has a Facebook page. He’s got a Twitter ID and a YouTube channel.

Now, we’re using social to showcase how the technology can help in healthcare, supply chains, and customer service and support by being able to analyze data and find problems before they become problems. We’ve enabled our sales teams with a content activation package with all the Watson facts and figures. We have really filled up our pipe and focused on lead generation using a Watson starter kit. The approach we took with Watson truly exemplifies a change in our marketing and sales processes leveraging social.

Internally, we use our community platform – IBM Connections – to connect a leadership network. We’re a very complex matrix organization that is constantly building the next generation of leaders. We share best practices, education tips, and opportunities to grow. Social provides us a way to strengthen informal networks and create new relationships.

We have also documented real savings from our internal collaboration efforts. In 2010, we saw a 50% productivity improvement in some areas and $4.5 million in savings using inside collaboration. We saved $700,000.00 per month in travel using video collaboration, and had significant reduction in e-mail server costs.

What’s important in a social business strategy?

We have a framework for social business that we call our social business agenda (see graphic below). It starts with a company aligning its goals and culture. If you don’t do that, you may get a lot of hits, views and fans, but that’s not what this is about. Eventually, it is about impacting your business, so if you can’t show business results and align business goals to it, it’s just going be something on the side.

The second thing we do is we teach companies how to gain friends and develop social trust. As a B2B company, you want to find your “tippers”, those important influencers. Our studies and those of the analysts show that somewhere between 5% and 16% of all the authors and engagers in the blogosphere influence everyone else. So, if you are trying to make an impact, you don’t need to go after a million people, just the 5% of that million people that will influence all the others.

Once you know your goals and who your friends are or need to be, we define the engagement experiences that are important to those people. Then, we look at which processes will deliver the best ROI for you, and which of those you want to socially enable. Is it human resources, marketing, customer service? What’s really going drive ROI for you?

The fifth step is to help you develop a reputation and risk management plan. This is the number one concern of most C-level executives I talk to. They tell me, “Social is too risky. I can’t do it.” But not doing anything is just as risky because people are already talking about you. It’s better to be the one setting the tone and trying to engage in a positive way than sitting back and allowing the conversation to be random.

The last thing is we focus on is analytics. This is a combination of software, services, and plain old planning. IBM is also a great social business, and we take the lessons we’ve learned and share those publicly.

What social trends do you think we’ll see in the next few years?

I see the whole area of crowd-sourcing and expert sourcing becoming more popular. I see mobile growing exponentially. Social gaming will be on the forefront of how we learn and the way we interact with brands. And location based services are at the cusp of making a big breakthrough.

And, of course, this whole area of socially enabling your business processes. Back in the Internet and early e-commerce days, I’d talk to companies who would laugh at me and say, “No one’s ever going to use the Internet for business. It’s just not going to happen.” Now, of course, you can’t have a business without the Internet.

I think the same thing is happening in terms of social business. I see a lot of companies saying, “That’s for kids, something my daughter does. It’s not going impact my business.” But this will be a bigger trend than the Internet was and it will be more important to get in early. E-commerce was more of a technology play but social business is a people play. Social is relationship based so getting involved early will help build relationships and create a time advantage that will make a difference. We know social businesses are outpacing their competition and accelerating growth.

Peter Friedman

Peter Friedman founded LiveWorld in 1996 and has 27 years of experience creating and executing community strategies for Fortune 500 companies. He has launched and managed multiple online services on a global scale, always focused on bringing people together in successful collaboration.

Previously, Peter was the vice president and general manager of Apple Computer’s Internet/Online Services business unit. He oversaw the creation, launch, and growth of Apple’s online services including AppleLink, eWorld, and Internet services such as Salon. His responsibilities also included managing Business Systems Marketing and product line management in Apple’s Macintosh division.

Social media is described as a strategy, a channel, a discipline, a set of technologies, a platform, etc. How do you define it?

Social is a media channel like TV or print, but really it’s more. It’s a societal change that transforms the way business, education and play are done because it enables people to dialogue and form relationships.

Is social media different in a B2B context than in a B2C context?

Whether it’s consumer or business, the core principles of dialogue and relationships are the same. In a consumer model people are often looking for affinity with similar minded people or to connect with a celebrity.

In B2B communities, however, the focus is on the content an influencer or other community member delivers. B2B participants are looking for what industry expert John Hagel calls ROA – Return on the Attention they provide. They want relationships, content, and expertise that will help make them successful in their businesses.

How are LiveWorld’s clients growing their businesses via social media?

Johnson & Johnson Diabetes Institute is a good example. They created a B2B community for health care providers and educators with the goal of engaging them in transforming diabetic care. J&J knows it doesn’t have to sell its products in the community. They just have to increase the number of influencers that are knowledgeable and engaged and that will bring product sales along. So far, 10 percentof all U.S. diabetes educators have joined and J&J is finding a two to three times increase in engagement with these programs.

American Express Open Forum is an example of a small business community that has grown to hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month over a multi-year period. They’ve seen increases in American Express cards issued and in transactions per card that they can correlate to the activity in that community.

One other example is eBay. Their online community of a million sellers started off with a focus on support for how to sell on eBay. Over time, it developed into a forum for members to help each other with their businesses and even connect on personal topics. It’s a good example of social being more than a channel. The interactions are valuable to the community and to eBay. A Harvard Business Study from a few years ago showed that sellers who are active in the community sell six times as much as those who are not active.

What are some key components in a social media strategy?

First, you need goals, a strategy and an implementation program based on your business goals, the brand and customer needs. “We should be on Twitter,” is not a thought out social media strategy. Think through what you’re trying to do and come up with a measurable goal, even if it is just to learn something.

Next make a sustained strategic and resource commitment to support the social media effort. We’ve seen a lot of people start and stop. That doesn’t work. As one of our clients once said, “This isn’t just for Christmas. It’s for life.” This is relationship marketing and relationship marketing wants follow through. You need to have people dedicated to the effort.

Once those elements are in place, we recommend focusing on three key success factors of a social community implementation: the cultural model, how the brand will participate, and how it’s integrated with the rest of the organization and its marketing.

Think of the cultural model for your social effort as the kind of party you are throwing – a gallery opening versus a rave, for example. The cultural model should reflect, extend and positively affect your brand while appealing to your customers.

The second success factor is how the brand participates. It’s your party so you need to be there and be the host or have someone help you host. Howard Schultz at Starbucks (an early LiveWorld investor) likened our online community moderators to his baristas – people who set a tone and create a cultural environment.

Finally, the effort needs to be integrated with the rest of your marketing and your organization. To really be successful, you need more and more parts of your company involved over time. It can’t stay in marketing. Whoever champions the effort, whether from marketing or another area, needs to champion it for all parts of the company because it’s going to affect customer support, sales, product development, etc. in ways that nothing else does. The more people in the company that participate, the closer you’ll be to your customers.

How do you know when your social media strategy is working?

One good indicator of success for your social media effort is that you’re seeing the emergence of brand ambassadors or, if you’re having a crisis, brand defenders. These are people who are enthusiastic about what you’re doing and becoming personalities in your effort.

A second indicator is that you’re getting a lot of questions from your community. Questions mean customers perceive your brand as one they want to interact with. If you have a blog with no comments, you’re not fostering engagement and that’s not very social. You want real dialogue amongst your customers and with your company.

A third way you know you’re succeeding is that you’re learning new things – like what your brand really is – because you’re listening and talking to your customers. We’ve had clients say “That’s not our brand,” when they get feedback. But if that’s what your customers are saying, it is your brand. It may not be what you want your brand to be, so you can either adapt to what your customers already think your brand is or do something fundamental to change it.

How do you ensure social feedback is shared inside a company?

Operationalizing and deploying the learnings from a social effort is very important and something the world is quite immature on now. A best practice example is eBay voices, a private message board and advisory council made up of selected community members. The feedback is reviewed by the executive team every week and everyone in the company knows about it. This allows the executive team to understand the customer better but it also sets a powerful cultural model for the company around listening to and engaging customers.

How do you mitigate the risk of bad PR with a social media effort?

People worry that their customers are going to tell them what the company should be doing. I ask them, “Don’t you spend a lot of money trying to get that information?” Companies want to know what their customers think but they need to break some bad habits.

You have to have an attitude of running towards your customers, not away from them. Anyone who’s going to say something online today is going to say it whether you’re there or not. You might as well listen to it and position yourself as a company that is seeking feedback and learning. It’s uncomfortable and difficult but companies that engage customers well will beat their competitors.

What social trends do you think we’ll see in the next few years?

In the next two years, social media will become more pervasive and the velocity will continue to increase. You’ll see more businesses orienting toward their customers and engaging them. Marketing will become more a mixture of culture, community and brand. And, there will be new applications and services that we don’t understand or realize yet. Right now everyone is thinking social is Facebook but there are other players starting to emerge that will be big.

In two to five years, demographic segmentation will fall away. Demographics were a guess about what people want based on data we could get. But now we can see how people think, behave and interact online so you can tell what they want instead of guessing. Segments in the future will be driven by opinion and behavior.

In five to ten years, corporations that are not running internally and externally on a social network model will have trouble hiring and retaining people. In the 1960s, if you didn’t have a phone system who was going to work for you? Similarly, in 2020, you’ll need a social network model to attract people coming out of school now who use social media as their primary means of interacting, learning and thinking.

Also in ten years, customer awareness will move across borders. Companies will no longer be able to rely on geography to artificially segment their products, behaviors and practices. Being locally relevant will still be important but customers in one country will know how you do business in every country.

This will hasten another phenomenon of the “best practice anywhere” becoming the “minimal expected practice everywhere” – like Amazon’s 1-Click. Today if you’re on any e-commerce website, you want to be able to buy with one click because you’ve had that experience. This expectation started with consumers but it will become the norm in B2B as well.

Finally, new experience models will emerge that will be very visual and mobile and will further ignite social.